‘My father is a biologist,’ he told her.
‘The birds and the bees,’ she said, lightly. ‘I expect that you were better prepared for the opposite sex than I was.’
‘I doubt it.’
Eating, sleeping, fucking … that was what his father had described to him at an early age as the basic animal, and human, needs. Jonah wasn’t sure that it had made him any better prepared for life and its inevitable disappointments.
‘My father is a Palestinian,’ he said, out of nowhere. He thought of adding: he is losing his mind.
Her eyes were watchful, ever alert. ‘Then you know what it’s like to be without a home.’
He felt torn. To agree would be dishonest: he had citizenship, there had always been a family home for him to go to, his parents, for all their difficulties, were still together; if he was homeless it was a result of his own bad choices, a bad marriage, an all-consuming job; but at the same time he had no wish to interfere in a fantasy of fraternity that might be all that Justine had to cling to.
‘They’ve decided to help you,’ she said.
‘I see,’ he said uncertainly.
‘You can go where you like.’ She smiled mischievously, and added, ‘And I’m coming with you.’
‘OK,’ he said, after a pause.
‘You’d better get some more sleep.’
They lay down beside each other, beneath piles of blankets. He woke up once and found her staring at him, her face just a few inches from his.
He was awake just before dawn and he pulled on his boots and went outside to stand in the bitter cold, watching the sky turn from deepest purple to palest blue streaked with pink.
It was eerily quiet.
‘It’s beautiful,’ Justine said. He didn’t hear her come up behind him. He turned to look at her. She had tied up her hair and she looked vulnerable in the dawn light. Beautiful, even. He felt his earlier antipathy to her melt away.
‘They’re wary of you,’ she said. ‘They’re not sure whose side you’re on. They don’t want to incur the anger of the Americans. If it wasn’t for me speaking up for you they wouldn’t have let you enter the liberated zone.’
‘Thank you,’ he said.
‘You’re not a journalist, are you?’
He didn’t reply.
‘I still believe in my country,’ she said, ‘despite everything.’
‘Like I said, I’m looking for a friend.’
‘Do you have many friends?’ she asked playfully, leaning into his shoulder.
‘Not many,’ he said ruefully.
They drove across a stark and barren landscape. Jonah sat on the bench seat with Justine squeezed in between him and the driver, with their thighs and elbows touching. He used a GPS to track their course as they left Algeria, cut across the northern tip of Mauritania and entered the ‘liberated zone’.
Jonah discovered that the driver’s name was Zalik and that he had originally been a road construction worker employed by a Spanish company, but that he had joined Polisario after the Spanish abandoned the colony and the Moroccans invaded.
After six hours they reached Birlehlu. There wasn’t much there but a corral of junked trucks, a cluster of sheet-metal huts constructed from flattened oil barrels, a few shipping containers and, some distance off, an abandoned colonial-era schoolhouse that housed the rescued migrants. They arrived in the early afternoon when the sun was so bright you had to squint to see through the windscreen.
Jonah wandered from room to room through the schoolhouse with Justine following. In one a line of African men in ill-fitting, blue boiler suits queued up to be inspected by a Spanish medical team. In another, two Bangladeshis wrapped in silver-foil blankets were staring disconsolately at the floor. They had paid a people trafficker in Dhaka several thousand dollars each to smuggle them to Europe. They had been wandering in the desert for four days before a Polisario patrol found them.
‘I thought I must die,’ one of them said to Justine, in halting English.
There was no sign of Nor. Jonah stepped out into the courtyard, into the burning sunlight, and shaded his eyes with his hand. Sweat ran down his back at once.
‘Where’s he from, this friend of yours?’ Justine asked.
‘He’s from Jordan,’ Jonah replied, reluctantly.
‘We need to go north if we are going to find him,’ she said, ‘towards the Berm.’
A pile of sardine tins stamped
MAROC
lying discarded in a dry river bed marked their passing. Zalik squatted down beside the tins and turned them over in his hands. ‘They came this way,’ he said, and then pointed to a nearby fold in the ground. ‘There are mines there.’
They got back in the Land Cruiser and drove a few kilometres farther along the wadi, following tyre tracks in the soft sand.
At a waterhole in a place named Budib they encountered a nomad family with a herd of camels. A woman in black robes and her pigeon-chested son sat on a bank of sand, watching their camels gathered above a cluster-bomb canister that was being used as a water trough. Tennis-ball-shaped explosive sub-munitions were scattered across the floor and sides of the wadi.
Zalik spoke to the woman and her son for a while and Jonah stood listening. They had not seen any migrants for twenty-four hours. Jonah worried that the escape route might have closed.
‘How long have you known this friend of yours?’ Justine asked.
‘We were at school together. His father knew mine.’
‘What are you going to do when you find him?’
‘Let’s find him first,’ he said.
‘We are close to the Berm now,’ Zalik said.
They parked the Land Cruiser at the base of a slope that was littered with hard black volcanic rock and set off up it on foot. They walked across a baking plateau. Zalik pointed to an escarpment that was about a kilometre away. It was the Berm. It was unmistakably man-made, a stark black line following the summit of the escarpment. Individual bunker positions and communications arrays were visible at intervals along the Berm. At the foot of the escarpment piles of stones at intervals marked the perimeter of the minefields.
They walked down a narrow gorge, and approached a line of sand dunes. Zalik showed them to a hollow that was dotted with thorn bushes.
‘Wait here,’ he said. He set off across the dunes.
The moonlight was blue and palpably cold. He sat in darkness, on the crest of the dune, waiting for the dawn. Zalik had vanished and Justine was huddled beside him in her sleeping bag. He glanced regularly at her, every few minutes, but his main focus was on the distant Berm, and the direction that Nor was expected to come from, if he came. Most likely it would not be this night. He listened to the sound of the wind rustling in the thorn bushes in the wadi below.
His life was such that he was often awake when others slept. He hadn’t planned it that way. He hadn’t envisaged it but that was how it had turned out.
September 1992–September 1993
He remembered his surprise on receiving the letter from Nor in which he told him that he had joined the British Army. He remembered thinking incredulously: what are you playing at? He remembered the subsequent drive up from the intelligence school at Chicksands to the military academy at Sandhurst. He had arrived after dark and found Nor lined up on show parade, the nightly punishment ritual in which those guilty of a transgression of discipline were forced to parade in their best uniform Blues in front of the college steps for inspection by a typically fearsome company sergeant major – Nor was on his fourteenth consecutive night of show parade. Jonah had hung back in the shadows at the edge of the square to watch.
‘Show pockets clean,’ the sergeant major had yelled, and the line of young officer cadets turned out their pockets and stood holding them between their forefingers and thumbs. The sergeant major had marched up the line with his pay stick tucked under his arm. He had clattered to a halt opposite Nor and bent almost double to inspect his pockets. After a few moments, he had straightened up, inhaled a lungful of breath and begun to yell.
‘Sand! Sand!!! You’ve got sand in the seams of your pockets, Mr Din! I don’t know where the fuck you think you are, you miserable little Ali Baba, but you’re not in the fucking desert now! You’re not buggering camels and gobbling sheep’s eyes! You’re not flying around on a fucking carpet! You’re not wearing a tea towel on your head! Look around you. Can you see a shimmering oasis fringed with gently swaying palm trees? Can you? A camel-hide tent filled with dancing virgins and burnished silver platters of Turkish Delight? Look at me, Mr Din, do I look like I jumped out of a lamp to grant you a fucking wish? I most certainly did not! You’re at the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst, Mr Din. You’re in Her Majesty’s army, wearing Her Majesty’s uniform. You are, without doubt, the most woeful example of a cadet that I have ever had the misfortune to attempt to turn into an officer, and if you don’t want to spend a thousand and one nights on show parade you had better get your miserable house in order. Show again!’
And so Nor was sentenced to another night on show parade, and so it went on and on. The sergeant major had stalked off the parade square, leaving one of the colour sergeants to fall out the cadets.
Afterwards, Nor had walked back towards the accommodation blocks with his eyes downcast. Jonah had fallen into step beside him. Nor had looked up but did not appear surprised.
‘This is your fault,’ he had told Jonah. ‘You have to get me out of here.’
It was close to midnight by the time he had turned off the dual carriageway, following the signs for the air force base. It was the spring of 1993, less than a week after Nor had been thrown out of the School of Infantry at Warminster, and dishonourably discharged from the army – less than a week since he had been set on a path that would eventually lead him to the North-West Frontier.
The entrance to the married quarters was a mile or so beyond the floodlit perimeter fence that surrounded the runway. He had almost missed it. People often did. There was a narrow lane with a dead-end sign, leading to an estate of red-brick 1950s housing tucked inconspicuously in a fold in the ground. He had driven between rows of identical houses on avenues named after distant battlefields, and turned into a cul-de-sac reserved for senior officers’ families.
Monteith’s cottage was located down a hard-core track that ran alongside one of the houses and then branched off into a stand of old oaks and overgrown rhododendrons. To get there Jonah had to open a gate and drive noisily across a cattle grid. It was typical of Monteith: of the military, but not in it.
It was said that the first true test of any fresh recruit to the Afghan Guides was to find Monteith’s cottage. There was even a rumour that a kindly army padre had taken it upon himself to gently inform luckless recruits that he found wandering the mown lawns of the married quarters that their services were no longer required and that they should return to unit. The cottage was an old gatehouse protecting a long-neglected track from the days before the air force base when the lands had been part of a family estate. It was brick and wood, with a flint tiled roof, mullioned windows and a carved oak doorway that was bleached with age. It sat amidst dense vegetation surrounded by a dogwood hedge that was clotted with clematis and honeysuckle.
Turning a corner in the track, he had been surprised to see Flora’s dented VW Beetle parked beside the hedge. As far as he had been aware, Monteith and his daughter Flora were not on speaking terms. Jonah hadn’t seen her for more than six months. He’d felt a sinking feeling. He’d said to himself, why is everything so bloody complicated? He knew what his wife’s response
,
under different circumstances, might be:
Life
is
complicated.
But his wife hadn’t been around to offer her particular brand of wisdom and it wasn’t a problem that he could go to her with.
Jonah had pressed the bell. The door opened and they stood there for a moment in the darkness. Then she’d reached up with her hands resting on his chest and lightly brushed her lips against his cheek. It was all he could do not to pick her up.
‘Come this way,’ she’d said, and stepped deftly out of reach.
He’d followed her down the hall, watching the sway of her hips beneath her robe. In the kitchen, she had leant forward over the porcelain sink, to stare out of the window facing the back garden. He’d stood beside her for a moment and waited while his eyes grew accustomed to the darkness.
‘He’s been out there since the sun went down,’ she had whispered. ‘He hasn’t moved an inch.’
Nor was squatting, balancing on the balls of his feet, in the centre of the lawn. His head was bowed and his hands were resting lightly on the grass. Jonah had felt his heart sink – Nor was losing it. It had taken him longer to locate Monteith. He was sitting with his back to a tree on the edge of the lawn.
‘The whole county is infested,’ Flora had said. ‘You’d think there was plague.’
Jonah had struggled to make sense of the scene for a moment and then he recognised the irregular mounds that littered the lawn –
molehills
. He’d almost laughed out loud.
‘He caught one last night,’ she’d said. ‘Just reached down and plucked it out of the hole. Amazing. Dad never taught me to catch moles.’
‘Nor me,’ Jonah had replied. ‘In fact, the only advice that he gave me was to find a shadow and stand in it.’
‘You’re standing in a shadow now,’ she’d said, without looking at him.
He’d shrugged in response. ‘It’s getting to be a habit.’
She had turned, and the little light there was shone on her face and her upturned nose and he’d wanted to reach out and kiss her.
‘Stop it,’ she’d whispered.
‘I’m sorry.’
‘What do you think you’re playing at?’
‘I don’t know. I just, just …’
‘Not that.
Him. Nor
. I thought you weren’t supposed to get sentimental with your agents. Treat them like dirt and when you’ve finished with them throw them to the wolves – isn’t that what your mentor, my precious father, says?’
‘Nor’s made for the work,’ Jonah had protested.
‘You’ve known him since you were a child,’ Flora had said. ‘He looks up to you. You should listen to him talking about you. I’ve had to the last couple of days. He’s practically in love with you. Are you ready to ditch him in some forgotten hellhole when it all goes wrong?’